The invention relates to a jacquard machine of the type having lifters (lifting hooks) controlled by electromagnets.
The jacquard machine as such is a machine which makes it possible to produce, by weaving, textile goods which provide a weave pattern comprising as many differently weaving warp threads as there are available lifters, or their number is divided by two if a double-lift machine is in question. There is not excluded the possibility of suspending several warp threads to a lifter under the condition that the respective pluralities of warp threads have each been uniformly woven with the weft threads. Though a jacquard machine only works together with a weaving loom machine, the development of either of them has followed its own path. Nowadays, one is confronted with the fact that as to the working speeds, the weaving loom machines rather surpass the jacquard machines and, hence, when manufacturing textile goods requiring a jacquard machine, the weaving loom machines are mostly not exploited at their optimum.
It is generally known that the major obstacles to an increase of the manufacturing capacity of jacquard machines reside in the mechanical components thereof, particularly in the reciprocating ones, as well as in cams and levers.
Parallel to the development in the other technical fields, the development of jacquard machines showed long ago that many a problem impeding the manufacturing speed could be avoided if a respective mechanical assembly was substituted by an appropriate electrical equivalent.
Such jacquard machines whose hooks or healds, respectively, are shifted by electromagnets are known e.g. from U.S. Pat. No. 4,936,357 to W. Keim et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 4,593,723 to J. D. Griffith. The expression "shifted by electromagnets" means that a hook or a heald, respectively, is drawn away from the influence of lifting knives. In the said solutions, too, the hook or the heald, respectively, aimed to lift--by means of a double set of pulleys--a warp thread connected with it is lifted to the upper shed by mechanical elements reciprocating in vertical direction and moving similarly to the levers. The two jacquard machines work on the principle of double-lift machines and the lifting knives are therefore arranged in two blade grids. The latter are arranged at the ends of the lifting levers, which cooperate with cams. The prior art jacquard machines thus show all the above-mentioned fundamental disadvantages which prevent the achieving of manufacturing speeds usual at modern weaving loom machines. However, the above-mentioned disadvantage is not the only disadvantage of the prior art jacquard machines. Namely, either of the two blade grids influences one half of the hooks or heald rods belonging to it. To each main harness cord two hooks and heald rods belong so that the total sum of the hooks or heald rods is twice the actual capacity of the jacquard machine--the greatest possible number of different weaving threads in a repeat of pattern (float repeat). Evidently, it involves an enormous number of components and a complex configuration.
It is now thus is now an object of the present invention to avoid the dependence of the mechanical drive of a jacquard machine upon a weaving loom machine and to eliminate the above-mentioned doubling of hooks or healds.
It is a further object of the invention to stabilize the upper portion of a slimly-designed lifter, the term "slimness" of the lifter meaning such a small cross-section of the lifter that, objectively, no lifter butt and no supporting bend as described above are possible.